Rough Draft Commencement Address

Tonight, I suppose that I'm supposed to speak about what the last four years have been like, how I've changed, how things have changed, and what the future may hold in store. So, to get all of that out of the way, the first two years were great. Suffice it to say, the last two haven't been so good. Due to a cluster fuck, a perfect shit storm of inept, incompetent, tyrannical, and bellicose administrators, arbitrary standards dictated by a goofy child president, and a concerted, systematic effort by others unknown to destroy and dismantle, figuratively and literally, our school, they have succeeded in removing one of the best alternatives that used to be available for students who needed one. We have seen the almost total replacement of the staff, including some of the best and most dedicated teachers I've known. As a result of this, there has been a precipitous decline in the effectiveness of San Andres High School as an institution. The school that I chose to come to, the school that I enjoyed coming to, no longer exists, and it is a fucking shame that students like myself have one less good option available to them. If I was not able to go to the school that San Andres used to be, my time in High School would've been much more of an ordeal. But there are larger issues facing us today. For the past few years this country has been on a dangerous course. Most egregiously, we invaded a country in a war of aggression. During the Nuremberg Trials the Chief American Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said this: "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." We started this war over four years ago, and in the intervening months, things have progressively continued to get worse. We've been fighting longer than we did in WWII, we've lost more soldiers than the number of people who were killed on 9/11, and the number of Iraqis who have been killed in those four years is on the same level as the number who were killed during Saddam's 24 year reign of terror, and a hundred more are killed every single day. The monetary cost of all this is approaching half a trillion dollars, with another two billion dollars more every week. The reasons we're there have changed too many times too count. We've abandoned all to readily and whole-heartedly many of the ideals fundamental to our country's being, the 800 year old right of Habeas Corpus, one of the cornerstones of western democracy, has been discarded with hardly a murmur. We stood by as our government abandoned thousands in the hellhole that New Orleans became after Hurricane Katrina drowned that city, killed two thousand people, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Our government has decided that it is okay to keep people locked up, for years, without charges or recourse to the law; that its justified to use torture, as a routine interrogation tactic. Right now, any one of you can be stripped of everything, every last right that you have, based on a presidential whim, and consigned to the solitary confinement of a naval brig, until you're deemed no longer a threat. From the response to 9/11, to the unmitigated disaster of Iraq, the Valerie Plame affair, the Terri Schiavo circus, New Orleans and Katrina, Warrant-less wiretapping, torture, abu ghraib, Nigerian Yellow Cake, the Downing Street memo, the bankrupting of the treasury, and so many more than can be counted, these last few years have been much worse than anything that occurred in even the Nixonian era, but that is not the worst of it. We, as a nation, have grown complacent. We do not get outraged, even in the face of such blatant transgressions that we've been faced with. There have always been tyrannical, belligerent, and corrupt people in charge, but we've failed to rise up to the challenge. There weren't people in the streets, there were no protests, no widespread instances of multitudes of people standing up and saying, "This is wrong. I will not be a part of this. I will do whatever I have to stop it." An overwhelming majority of people oppose the catastrophe that we created in Iraq, but there have been no occupations of student union buildings or recruitment offices. The vast number of protests have been reserved to standing on the sidewalk, holding signs in the air. The political tide is turning, but we failed to meet the challenges of the chronic crisis we have. The thing that we must do now, is demand accountability from the people who've caused so much damage. In order for us to regain this country's soul, those people must be impeached, they must be indicted, and they must be incarcerated. If lying about a hummer in the oval office justified an impeachment trial for the last guy, lies that have lead to in excess of half a million deaths surely justifies much harsher measures for this one.